Meat-Stuffed Gluten Puffs 肉酿面筋

Meat-Stuffed Gluten Puffs (肉酿面筋) are a Wuxi (无锡) dish of fried wheat-gluten balls filled with seasoned minced pork and simmered in a soy-sauce broth. The dish is also known as youmianjin sairou (油面筋塞肉), "fried gluten stuffed with meat". Chinese Wikipedia names it, with mixed gluten (什锦面筋), as one of the two most typical traditional Wuxi dishes built around gluten.

Ingredients

The shells are Wuxi's qingshui fried gluten (清水油面筋), counted with Huishan clay figurines (惠山泥人) and Wuxi spare ribs (无锡酱排骨) among the city's three traditional products, and listed as a Jiangsu provincial intangible cultural heritage item. Wheat flour is mixed with water and a little salt, and the dough is rinsed again and again in clear water until only raw gluten is left; this is rolled into small balls and fried in hot oil, where it swells quickly and turns golden. Qingshui, "clear water", refers to the good vegetable oil pressed from fresh rapeseed that is used for frying, not to rinsing. The puffs come out crisp and golden outside and loose and white inside. Chinese Wikipedia notes that the doughier fried gluten of nearby Suzhou (苏州) and Changzhou (常州) tends to come away from the meat when stuffed.

How it is made

The Wuxi cuisine dictionary (无锡菜典) recipe cited by Chinese Wikipedia takes 250 g of medium-sized gluten puffs to 500 g of pork. The pork is chopped and mixed with salt, soy sauce, sugar, yellow wine, MSG and a little minced scallion and ginger. A small hole is cut in each puff and the filling is pushed inside. Water seasoned with yellow wine, soy sauce, sugar, MSG, scallion and ginger is brought to a boil over high heat, the puffs go in and simmer over low heat for about 15 minutes, and the sauce is thickened with starch and finished with a little sesame oil. The recipe uses 40 g of sugar against 25 g of soy sauce.

How it is eaten

Red-braised, the stuffed puffs turn a deep red and taste rich, combining meat with the gluten. The Paper (澎湃新闻), in a report republished by China News Service, describes the dish as a fixture of the New Year's Eve dinner for Shanghai families with Wuxi roots, for whom it tastes of home.